A thought born at sunrise on Île Sainte-Hélène, Montréal - August 2026
An Appetite for Magnificence.
I was born into possibility.
Around me, music was breaking forms. Satisfaction. Help! James Brown. Dylan. A generation was making a new soundtrack while engineers, architects and scientists were making the impossible feel increasingly possible.
Two years later Montréal opened Expo 67 and two years after that, humans walked on the Moon.
As a little boy, I drew Apollo again and again. Sometimes I put my house on top of the spacecraft and drew a ladder to reach it. I was not trying to predict my future. I was simply living in a world that made imagination feel legitimate.
This morning, it came back.
At sunrise, I stood on Île Sainte-Hélène looking at the Biosphère.
I thought about the people who first imagined its geometry, calculated it, turned it into parts, transported those parts and assembled them into something magnificent.
That matters today.
Our tools can now give us extraordinary results before we fully understand the process that produced them. AI makes that question even more important. The purpose of a powerful tool should not be to make human understanding unnecessary. It should make human imagination more capable.
Magnificence is not luxury.
It can be Apollo. It can be the Biosphère. It can be a song that changes what music can be.
And this morning, it was also sunlight through the trees, yellow birds making a choreography they will never repeat, and a marmot collecting grass for whatever important marmot business comes next.
Magnificence does not require extravagance.
It requires attention, curiosity, care and the willingness to imagine that something can be better than it is.
I still have it.
Nearly sixty-one years after I was born into that extraordinary period, I still want to understand things. I still want to imagine. I still want to build. I still want to notice.
I still have an appetite for magnificence and I don't think this belongs to the 1960s.
It belongs to anyone, of any age, who decides that the future is still worth creating.